From 8 February 2013 to 5 September 2013, the following six polls ran on Sandra and Woo. All of them got over a thousand votes and it’s time to present the results.

Poll from 8 February 2013:

I’m not surprised that the strips about Cloud’s “little” problem at the beach received the most votes. Sandra’s and Larisa’s visit of the Museum of Modern Art was also popular among our readers. I expected more votes for the story arc featuring Sandra as private eye Sandy South, though.

Poll from 8 February 2013:

Our readers like to eat Italian, Japanese and Chinese dishes. Although 55% of our readers are from the United States, these three types of cuisine received more votes than the American cuisine. Of course such a poll is always a little bit arbitrary.

Poll from 8 February 2013:

Only around 10% of our readers read all the comments. But among the readers who voted there is also just a small minority, around 15%, who never have a look at the comment section.

Poll from 8 February 2013:

The same poll already ran on 6 January 2010, so it’s interesting to compare the results. There are now much more readers who read very few newspaper comic strips, 54% compared to 40%. However, there were now 2,258 votes compared to just 430 in 2010 so one cannot say that the same readers now read less newspaper comic strips.

Poll from 13 July 2013:

I selected all the winners of the previous poll during the first 4 1/2 years of Sandra and Woo for this poll, plus the recent one where Woo saved Lily during a thunderstorm which was obviously a popular one. The poll was quite close with 24% for the first place and still 14% for the fifth place. The second story arc taking place at the beach won this competition as well. Nonetheless, it will take a long time until I’ll write another whole story arc about Cloud’s penis ;). My personal favorite story arc so far is the treasure hunt. I think it is rich in variety and has some very good jokes. However, I think it will soon be replaced by the storyline I’m currently writing about the female raccoon climber Butterfly.

Poll from 11 August 2013:

The majority has spoken and since it was my initial plan as well, the solution to “The Book of Woo” will be posted as strip #1000. YAY, I DON’T HAVE TO WRITE A SPECIAL STRIP FOR STRIP #1000!! 😉 (Assumed nobody is able to crack the code before that.)

Some time ago, I wrote a lettering guide for Sandra and Woo and Gaia. It is a collection of various tips for better lettering and was meant for internal use, but I figured other cartoonists might also be interested in it. So here it is:

I have recently received a few complaints about annoying ads on sandraandwoo.com, in particular from readers visiting the website on their Android mobile phone. I want to apologize for that, but you have to understand that it’s not always easy for me to fix this kind of problem, especially without further information about the ad. Every user, including myself, sees different ads! I have already limited our pool of ad agencies to those who offer the possibility to block certain kinds of ads (and domains) in their administration panel. Please write an e-mail to novil@gmx.de or write a post in this forum thread if you had a problem with an ad. The comment section of a comic is not the right place for such complaints.

If sandraandwoo.com is not the only the website suddenly showing popup ads or other annoying ads, it might also be possible that your Android phone is compromised. Android phones are gradually becoming the number one target for viruses and malware, including malicious apps tinkering with the web browser.

About posters

I know that there are around 20 readers waiting for their free posters. Last week, I was finally able to take the time to prepare everything, at least I thought so. I ordered and received the mailing tubes and prepared the image files. However, it turned out that the print shop wants PDF files and I’m currently a bit puzzled how to create them. I need:

2 images on an A1 print, 5 images on an A3 print, 3 images on an A4 print.

The images should be enlarged (or shrinked) to fill the format, including a small white border around them.

There should be no quality loss.

I looked for PNG to PDF converters but found nothing that matches my requirements since the PDFCreator is bundled with malware. So maybe I will just use Word. However, I’m afraid that will become a tedious task. But it’s probably still faster than using LaTeX… Well, if someone could give me a tip in the comment section I’d appreciate it. If someone could do the whole conversion for me that would be even better. If you’re eager to help, write an e-mail to novil@gmx.de.

Update: I used Scribus as recommended by a few readers. Thank you for all your suggestions!

About Larisa’s secret

Many of you wonder if Larisa’s “big secret” is related to her behavior in [0126] Secrets. While I don’t want to talk about that in particular, it certainly appears odd that I haven’t written a story arc about Larisa’s background in all these years since [0126] Secrets was published. The reason for that is that I started to like the story arc that I had originally planned less and less and eventually decided to ditch it. I’m sure that many of you would not have liked that story arc or even hated it as well. I can therefore only ask for your patience until I’m able to come up with a story arc of the usual quality you can expect from Sandra and Woo.

Since nobody visits our forum (I’m not particularly sad about that since I’m not fond of moderating forums.), I decided to publish some of my most interesting forum posts on our homepage over the course of the next weeks.

Here you can see two comic strips I drew when I was 11 years old. I was a huge fan of the European Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse comics at that time, but I also liked to read Peanuts, Garfield and Hagar the Horrible. I was maybe better at drawing back then than I am now. I often copied drawings from the comics I read and also created a couple of original comic characters. I rarely drew complete comic strips, though, and my main interest gradually shifted towards PC games and playing tennis. Today, I would be able to post my comics and drawings on DeviantArt, reaching a much larger audience than just my mother. Maybe I wouldn’t have lost interest in creating art with today’s possibilities.

When I was in my twenties, my interest in creating comics grew again. At least a year before the start of Sandra and Woo, there was a feature on Halfpixel.com called Time Friends. Basically, you could insert your own dialog into the empty speech bubbles of the template strip you can see below.